#65 Disclosure

March 3, 2021
Disclosure (2020) ****
Netflix
Free
Movies from 2020

“Martin Wright Edelman said, “Children cannot be what they cannot see.” And it’s not just about children, it’s about all of us. We cannot be a better society until we see that better society. I cannot be in the world until I see that I am in the world.”

I decided I still didn’t want to see Come to Daddy, so I spun the wheel again to get a new 2020 movie for tonight. It came up Disclosure, and I had no memory at all of what this movie was.

I looked it up, and it is a documentary about representation of trans people in media. And I thought, boy howdy does that sound dry and possibly a little depressing. And maybe like a lecture? But it does have 98% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so I’ll give it a whirl. I thought maybe I’d watch 10 or 15 minutes and if I didn’t like it I’d try and find something else.

Dry? Depressing? Lecturing? Not on your life! This is absolutely a terrific documentary, enjoyable from the beginning, but as it keeps going, it gets deeper and more moving and powerful, until the last half hour, when it becomes one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.

It never crossed my mind before, but most of the time throughout most of the history of trans characters in television and movies, they are either jokes, victims, crazed killers, or disgusting. I mean, the montage of clips of men vomiting because they find out that the woman they are with is trans, is horrifying. Can you imagine what it would be like if that was all you saw when you saw yourself on screen? Also, sex workers, they are mostly sex workers.

But this film is not a diatribe against popular culture, there is a Variety review that I saw when I was googling the movie that said, “Rather than making audiences feel bad about trans-themed movies they may have naively enjoyed in the past, it educates on the larger issues while unpacking a legacy of problematic representation.” It doesn’t scold, it just alters your perspective.

They have a marvelous number of trans men and women talking heads, Laverne Cox, of course, who is also the producer of the film, and Lilly Wachowski, and Chaz Bono, but my absolute favourites were the fabulous Candis Cayne from Dirty, Sexy Money, Jen Richards from I Am Cait, and Sandra Caldwell, who had been spending most of her life as an actress hiding the fact that she was trans, but now she is out and talks about how amazing that feeling is.

The most moving part, for me, was Jen Richards talking about how on I Am Cait they had some parents of trans children on, and how this one guy was not only loving and accepting of his trans son, but enthusiastic and over the moon about what a great kid he was. Jen said she had to spend so much time being okay with the fact that her mother said that she could never call her Jen because Jen had murdered her son, that she couldn’t see her grandmother before she died because her family wouldn’t let her in the house without her dressing like a boy, that one of her best friends won’t allow her to meet his children, but when she saw that man, she was like, (and I am paraphrasing) why wasn’t my mother like that? Why weren’t my friends like that? And most of all, why wasn’t I like that? Nobody has ever felt about me like that man did about his child, including me.

This is so good, so good. Somehow it’s not on the shortlist for this year’s Oscars, but I think it belongs on any list of great documentaries. And it reminds me that I have never seen The Celluloid Closet, so I should see that soon.